The Role of New Technologies to Foster Positive Youth Development

This paper describes a developmental systems approach to applied developmental sciences (ADS) which provides a framework to design and evaluate technology-rich programs that promote positive development by emphasizing the strengths and assets of people, instead of focusing on diminishing or preventing risk-taking behaviors. Up to now, most of the psycho educational programs conceived within the ADS model have not focused on the role of new technologies in young people's lives. This absence is particularly striking given that, in today’s world, new technologies play an important role in different areas of the lives of young people, such as education, entertainment, socialization and communication. This article presents the concept of Identity Construction Environments (ICE), an interdisciplinary model that proposes guidelines to design and study new technologies purposefully created to promote positive youth development (PYD). Two types of ICE have been developed: one focusing on stand-alone technologies for learning, such as the Zora virtual city; and the other focusing on an approach for developing technologically-rich learning contexts, such as the Project Inter-Actions robotics workshops. This paper presents both examples of ICE and describes how their design fosters the